Page 203 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

They had had a falling-out recently, a row, Madaline and Mr. Gianakos. Mamá

didn’t tell me any of this information; I knew it from a clandestine, hasty, partial
read of the letter Madaline had sent Mamá informing her of her intent to visit.
It grows so tiresome, I tell you, to be around Andreas and his right-wing
friends and their martial music. I keep tight-lipped all the time. I say nothing
when they exalt these military thugs who have made a mockery of our
democracy. Should I utter so much as a word of dissent, I am confident they
would label me a communist anarchist, and then even Andreas’s influence would
not save me from the dungeons. Perhaps he would not bother exerting it,
meaning his influence. Sometimes I believe it is precisely his intent to provoke
me into impugning myself. Ah, how I miss you, my dear Odie. How I miss your
company …

The day our guests were due to arrive, Mamá awoke early to tidy up. We
lived in a small house built into a hillside. Like many houses on Tinos, it was
made of whitewashed stone, and the roof was flat, with diamond-shaped red
tiles. The small upstairs bedroom Mamá and I shared didn’t have a door—the
narrow stairwell led right into it—but it did have a fanlight window and a narrow
terrace with a waist-high wrought-iron balustrade from which you could look out
on the roofs of other houses, on the olive trees and the goats and winding stone
alleys and arches below, and, of course, the Aegean, blue and calm in the
summer morning, white-capped in the afternoon when the meltemi winds blew in
from the north.

When she was done cleaning up, Mamá put on what passed for her one fancy
outfit, the one she wore every August fifteenth, the Feast of the Dormition at the
Panagia Evangelistria Church, when pilgrims descended on Tinos from
everywhere in the Mediterranean to pray before the church’s famed icon. There
is a photo of my mother in that outfit—the long, drab rusty gold dress with a
rounded neckline, the shrunken white sweater, the stockings, the clunky black
shoes. Mamá looking every bit the forbidding widow, with her severe face, her
tufted eyebrows, and her snub nose, standing stiffly, looking sullenly pious, like
she’s a pilgrim herself. I’m in the picture too, standing rigidly at my mother’s
hip. I am wearing a white shirt, white shorts, and white kneesocks rolled up. You
can tell by my scowl that I’ve been ordered to stand straight, to not smile, that
my face has been scrubbed and my hair combed down with water, against my
will and with a great deal of fuss. You can sense a current of dissatisfaction
between us. You see it in how rigidly we stand, how our bodies barely make
contact.

Or maybe you can’t. But I do every time I see that picture, the last time being